Today Progress
Software announced the acquisition of Savvion http://web.progress.com/inthenews/progress-software-co-01112010.html. I believe this heralds the beginning of
a very exciting phase for Progress Software. Now Progress has become a leader
in Business Process Management (BPM). But more than that, combined with our
other solutions, Progress is now uniquely able to empower businesses to be operationally responsive – through responsive,
dynamic and predictive business processes. And this is critical to keep modern
businesses competitive.
You might wonder about
the journey Progress went through to realize what the market needed. It was all
about understanding the emerging needs of our customers and where they needed
their businesses to go. The part of my job I enjoy the most is spending time
with customers and understanding what pain points they have - with the ultimate
goal of working with them to address the pain and making them highly
competitive.
Over the last
couple of years I have been hearing more and more from customers about the need
to be operationally responsive. For example, many customers have expressed
their desire to proactively – and often in real-time - address the needs of
their customers and respond to the behavior of their competitors. The goals are
to win new business, increase customer satisfaction and triumph over their
competitors. These findings hold true whether the customer be in banking,
insurance, communications, travel, transport, logistics, energy, gaming or many
other industries. It could be British Airways ensuring their high value
customers are looked after first in the event of a flight delay, or wireless
carrier 3Italia pushing real-time offers to their customers based on their profile,
activity and location, or maritime logistics provider Royal Dirkzwager
dynamically adjusting the course and speed of a container ship to optimize fuel
usage, based on weather conditions and port berth availability.
Operational
responsiveness is thus about being highly responsive to opportunities and
threats – and even anticipating such scenarios. Market research supports what I’ve
been hearing, such as the recent survey by Vanson Bourne http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/companies-stuck-in-o-10062009.html
– suggesting Operational Responsiveness has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have.
There are a
number of business facing solutions that have shown great promise in addressing
operational responsiveness. One of those is Business Transaction Assurance
(BTA). This enables businesses to discover their business processes and gain
visibility on the effectiveness of these business processes – even if they are
built in a wide variety of heterogeneous technologies and work across legacy
applications. BTA non-disruptively discovers business processes – without any
modification to existing applications – and monitors to ensure processes run to
completion. BTA also discovers bottlenecks and hotspots in the processes –
enabling businesses to understand just how efficiently they run.
Another important
solution is Business or Complex Event Processing (BEP or CEP). This enables
business users to model the detection of and reaction to patterns indicating business
opportunities and threats in real-time. Examples could be an opportunity to up-sell
to a customer on the web-site now (opportunity) or risk exceeding a key level
(threat).
And then of
course there’s Business Process Management (BPM). This enables business users
to model and execute a business process flow. BPM is also widely used for
Business Process Improvement (BPI) – the re-engineering of (parts of) existing
processes to improve their effectiveness.
The really cool
thing we realized in talking with our customers is what happens when you use
BTA, BEP/CEP and BPM together. Suddenly businesses are empowered to discover
how effective they run, to detect opportunities and threats dynamically and to
invoke business processes in response. The business becomes dynamic and
responsive. Business users can take control and model the behavior they want
their business to exhibit under certain circumstances, and through dashboards
they can track the effectiveness of the business. Over time, the areas of the
business processes that should be improved can also be detected.
Progress already
has leading products in BTA and BEP/CEP with Actional and Apama. Progress chose
Savvion to complete the story for a number of reasons. Savvion has a history of
innovation and is a leading pure-play BPM provider. But Savvion also has a very
rich platform, which includes not just BPM modeling and execution, but also an
event engine, a business rules engine, a document management system and an
analytics engine. The fact that Savvion enables business processes that respond
to events means it immediately works well with Actional and Apama. And with
high performance, scalability and availability, Savvion fits perfectly into
Progress – where we pride ourselves that all of our products exhibit these
characteristics.
In summary,
Progress is now a best-of-breed BPM vendor – and not just at the departmental
level – but at the enterprise level. But we’re also more than that. Our goal is
to enable operational responsiveness and ensure our customers gain competitive
advantage through the power of responsive, dynamic and predictive business
processes.
